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BitTorrent v2

blog.libtorrent.org

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Re: BitTorrent v2

#271

Post by giantrobot »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #193
cercatrova wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories in how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be. This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products shou…

>This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products should learn. Consumers don't care how it works. I distinctly remember being a teenager and learning how bittorrent worked, thinking it's the coolest thing I'd heard of and laboriously explaining how it worked to a friend that sounded interested. At the end of the explanation he asked "So how do you download music with it?" And I realized all…

> It's really easy for programmers to get lost in how cool some code or technology is and lose sight of how the rest of the world views it.

Story of my fucking life.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#272

Post by abakker »

chemmail wrote: post #231
dchuk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…

Sound like someone who drives a gas car and doesn't want to move into the future. I'm not saying bitcoin is the future per se, but the rest of the world i moving on from standard monies.

What are they moving to? Where is the data or transaction volume to support that the rest of the world except the US and EU are moving to alternative money?

Re: BitTorrent v2

#273

Post by bonoboTP »

dane-pgp wrote: post #266
jandrese wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing BitTorrent did that was smart was to completely ignore discovery. We already have the web, and putting tiny files up on web pages is a much better solution than some half baked built-in distributed search service.

It was good design to decouple the transfer protocol from the search protocol, to allow different technologies to be explored, but in practice people ended up relying on the "good enough" solution of using the web for search. Setting the precedent that media companies can seize domain names and force ISPs to block access to search engines if they don't like some of the search results (while ruining the lives of the p…

Yes. For all the P2P distributed praise ITT, torrent as a whole, as it is used in the real world, is very centralized. If the Pirate Bay is shut down, that stuff is gone.

Uploading became a privilege, something that normal average people don't do. Earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. I don't know anybody who has ever created a torrent themselves. Everybody just downloads and seeds the pre-packaged stuff from the centralized sites, much like the walled garden philosophy of app stores.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#274

Post by gruez »

nicbou wrote: post #257
dchuk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…

It has been a few years, and despite a few attempts, I still don't really understand bitcoin. Yes yes ledgers and proof of work and yada yada, but I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now. As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any busine…

>As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account

Not really. If I want a bank account I need to fill out a page of paperwork requiring my name, address, social security number, citizenship information, income, occupation, date of birth, scans of various pieces of ID and/or other documents. Compare this to bitcoin where you only need to install an app, and new identities can be generated on-demand. It's true that trying to buy/sell bitcoins via an exchange will subject you to AML requirements, but in-person transactions won't.

>transactions take forever, they cost money [...] unlike my free credit card.

The cost and time it takes is mostly a function of how much demand is there for blockchain space. During periods of high transaction volume, you'll either have to pay high fees or wait a long time. You can see in this chart https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d that there are periods of very high transaction fees (the yellow peaks correspond to a $3 fee for a typical transaction), but also periods with low transaction fees (the parts with blue troughs correspond to a $0.12 fee for a typical transaction). People in a hurry pay more and people who can wait pay less. It's a classic microeconomics.

Credit cards aren't free either. The cost (around 2-3% in the US) is borne by the merchant. Cash has fees for handling, transportation, and storage. "Free" bank transfers (eg. vemo, SEPA) are typically restricted to consumers, are often part of a bigger banking package, which have fees or minimum balance requirements.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#275

Post by ShroudedNight »

iso947 wrote: post #181
Dahoon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought internet in Norway was cheaper than in Denmark. Interesting. For comparison I pay 449 DKR/month for 1000/1000 unlimited fiber with a guaranteed bandwidth of minimum 950 (they are upgrading the network atm. hence not a guarantee on the full 1000 yet as some customers equipment is too old). Is it a normal connection or a business connection perhaps?

Bandwidth to where? Do they really have 1gbit per customer peering with say level3? And with cogent, and telia? And a full non blocking internal network? And enough packet buffers to ensure that microbursts don’t saturate any link?

Depending on the SLA, or lack thereof, they could have enough peering for a sustained +(x = 3?)σ demand spike without having a full dedicated peering for each customer, and still reasonably guarantee throughput availability.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#276

Post by proverbialbunny »

jedberg wrote: post #167
proverbialbunny wrote: post #25

It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. It would be nice if BitTorrent v2 made it harder for ISPs to identify what is bit torrent traffic. AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds.

> AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds Do you have a source on this? I believe you I just want to know more. It explains a lot. I have a gigabit link. I can download torrents at almost line speed. But I can barely get uploads past 5K/s. I spent hours at one point trying to tweak every possible setting and eliminate every bottleneck, and still couldn't get past 5K/s.

Just first hand experience like yourself. I'm on gigabit duplex too. What's interesting is while I'm downloading my upload far less throttled (I upload at 100mbps sometimes), but when I'm seeding I tend to max at 1 mbps out of the 1000 I'm paying for.

Something else is the router AT&T requires will not completely open ports for you. What it does is it is closed for incoming connections that do not hit it multiple times then it opens up, so I appear like my ports are not open on AT&T. But even when I get around that (you can rip the certificates off of the router) AT&T itself limits the connection. If you transfer too much on one port on the backend they will remotely block the port sometimes. (Transferring too much being very little here, around 50MB, maybe even 10MB.)

Good news is Comcast does not pull this crap and has fiber internet. Bad news is they start at 2gbps and start at $210 a month in most areas. I'm paying $60 for AT&T gigabit.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#277

Post by int_19h »

sanderjd wrote: post #267
nicbou wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a few years, and despite a few attempts, I still don't really understand bitcoin. Yes yes ledgers and proof of work and yada yada, but I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now. As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any busine…

It's simple: it is an abject failure as a currency. It is fairly successful as a security for the purpose of speculation. If you aren't a financial speculator, you really don't need to pay attention to it.

It's also fairly successful as a way to transfer money.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#278

Post by terrortrain »

tomxor wrote: post #215

> not only uses a hash tree, but it forms a hash tree for every file in the torrent [...] > Files that are identical can also more easily be identified across different swarms, since their root hash only depends on the content of the file. Wait, content addressed blobs across swarms... does that mean torrents made by completely different people at different times that happen to contain one or more identical files can…

I haven't looked at it for a while, but wasn't that the big feature of ipfs?

Re: BitTorrent v2

#279

Post by wmf »

coronadisaster wrote: post #253
nabla9 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to circumvent the law, you must find a legal technicality, not a technical technicality. The key weakness in every smartass technical technicality to circumvent the law is forgetting that intent is core concept when the law is interpreted in the court. Did the defendant have intent to do X? Did the defendant use some purpose build technique to avoid doing the most literal interpretation X ? .. Yeah, defen…

"must find a legal technicality, not a technical technicality." I think we are ok as long as there are no precedents? Isnt that how smartass laws work?

If you want to be the next David LaMacchia or Shawn Fanning I guess.

Re: BitTorrent v2

#280

Post by sbierwagen »

Thorentis wrote: post #248
tomxor wrote: post #215

> not only uses a hash tree, but it forms a hash tree for every file in the torrent [...] > Files that are identical can also more easily be identified across different swarms, since their root hash only depends on the content of the file. Wait, content addressed blobs across swarms... does that mean torrents made by completely different people at different times that happen to contain one or more identical files can…

This right here is the biggest new feature in my opinion, and should have been discussed in more depth in the announcement. I also think they should have pursued this avenue further before releasing v2. Content addressing is one of the big advantages of p2p applications, and IPFS has been pushing it for a long time. Just imagine if this was done all the way down to the piece level. You have two different torrents (sa…

>Just imagine if this was done all the way down to the piece level.

I don't know about that. With a reasonably large number of users, wouldn't you start seeing hash collisions via birthday paradox? Might be better off keeping it at the file level. (Though this does incentivize malicious users to find hash collisions of particular files they want to defend, and seeding the swarm with garbage files)

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